Wednesday, 23 October 2013

On GPG/PGP Keys...

Way back in 2010, I attended the GSoC Mentors Summit. I thought that would be a perfect time to get a new GPG key signed by a lot of people. Unfortunately, I decided to do this the night before flying out to Mountain View. With the lack of sleep, long flight, and busy weekend, I promptly forgot the passphrase to that key.

For quite a while, I tried to remember or somehow guess the passphrase, to no avail. I even wrote a Python script to try out combinations of fragments I thought might be in it. Alas, I had no success.1

Since I just attended another Mentors Summit this past weekend, I had no choice but to come up with a new key. The new key ID is 0x8D86E7FA E5EB0C10 and eventually it will accumulate some signatures from the event as I go through them. The old key, 0xACA35FE6, really didn't have too many signatures2, so I guess it's no great loss.

1 Okay, I realize you have no way of trusting this statement if you've already trusted the old key, but I can't really do anything about that anymore.↩